Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

memory T cells

Are immune-experienced mice better for sepsis research?

Why isn’t a laboratory mouse more like a human? There are several answers, beyond the differences in size and physiology between mice and humans, such as microbiome and immunological experience. Emory researchers led by Mandy Ford and Craig Coopersmith recently published a couple papers that aim to take those factors into account.

The goal is to make mouse immune systems and microbiomes more complex and more like those in humans, so the mice they can better model the deadly derangement of sepsis. So far, sepsis research in mice has been a poor predictor of clinical success. This aligns with work at the National Institutes of Health on “wildling” mice, which have microbes more like wild mice. (Lab Land likes noticing a trend that Emory researchers are part of.)

One Emory paper, in FASEB Journal, shows that mortality in a mouse model of sepsis varies according to the commercial facility where the mice came from. When the mice were allowed to live together and exchange microbes, mortality numbers evened out.

Another, published in JCI Insight, looks at mice that have more memory T cells than naïve mice, since adult humans have a high proportion of memory T cells in their immune systems. Other scientists have shown that sepsis leads to a wipeout of memory T cells, and probably vulnerability in defending against infection. Read more

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Mopping up immune troublemakers after transplant

Emory scientists have identified a way to stop troublemaker cells that are linked to immune rejection after kidney transplant. The finding could eventually allow transplant patients to keep their new kidneys for as long as possible, without the side effects that come from some current options for controlling immune rejection.

The results are published in Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The standard drugs used for many years, calcineurin inhibitors, show side effects on cardiovascular health and can even damage the kidneys over time. A newer FDA-approved medication called belatacept, developed in part at Emory, avoids these harmful effects but is less effective at stopping acute rejection immediately after the transplant. Belatacept is a “costimulation blocker” – it interferes with a signal some immune cells (T cells) need to proliferate and become activated.

Researchers led by Emory transplant surgeon Andrew Adams, MD, PhD suspected that long-lasting memory CD8+ T cells were resistant to belatacept’s effects.

“Our previous work identified that memory CD8+ T cells may be elevated in animals and human patients who go on to reject their transplanted organs while taking belatacept,” says Dave Mathews, an MD/PhD student who worked with Adams and is the first author of the paper.

The researchers identified a certain marker, CD122, which was present on memory CD8+ T cells and important for their activity. On T cells, CD122 acts as a receiving dish for two other secreted molecules, IL-2 and IL-15, generally thought of as inflammatory cytokines, or protein messengers that can encourage graft rejection. Read more

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Troublemaker cells predict immune rejection after kidney transplant

Emory scientists have identified troublemaker cells—present in some patients before kidney transplantation—that are linked to immune rejection after transplant. Their results could guide transplant specialists in the future by helping to determine which drug regimens would be best for different groups of patients. Eventually, the findings could lead to new treatments that improve short- and long-term outcomes.

Transplant patients used to have no choice but to take non-specific drugs to prevent immune rejection of their new kidneys. While these drugs, called calcineurin inhibitors, are effective at preventing early rejection, they lack specificity for the immune system and ironically can damage the very kidneys they are intended to protect. In addition, their side effects lead to higher rates of high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, ultimately shortening the life of the transplant recipient. This changed with the advent of costimulation blockers, which avoid these harmful side effects. Emory transplant surgeons Chris Larsen and Tom Pearson, together with Bristol-Myers Squibb, helped develop one of these new drugs called belatacept, which blocks signals through the costimulatory receptor CD28.

In a long-term clinical study of belatacept, kidney transplant patients tended to live longer with better transplant function when taking belatacept compared with calcineurin inhibitors. Despite these desirable outcomes, acute rejection rates were higher in patients treated with belatacept.

Andrew Adams, an Emory transplant surgeon who focuses on costimulation blockade research, notes: “While the acute rejection seen with belatacept is treatable with stronger immunosuppression, there may be long-term effects that linger and impair late outcomes.”

Most transplant centers have not yet adopted this new therapy as their standard of care because of the higher rejection rate as well as other logistical concerns, thus limiting patients’ access to potential health benefits afforded with belatacept treatment.

Adams and colleague Mandy Ford have identified certain types of memory T cells, which typically provide long-lasting immunity to infection, as potential mischief-makers in the setting of organ transplants treated with belatacept. Evidence is accumulating that the presence of certain memory T cells can predict the likelihood of “belatacept-resistant” rejection. Two recent papers in American Journal of Transplantation by Ford and Adams support this idea. Read more

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Are you experienced?

Are you experienced? Your immune system undoubtedly is. Because of vaccinations and infections, we accumulate memory T cells, which embody the ability of the immune system to respond quickly and effectively to bacteria or viruses it has seen before.

Not so with mice kept in clean laboratory facilities. Emory scientists think this difference could help explain why many treatments for sepsis that work well in mice haven’t in human clinical trials.

Screen Shot 2016-08-24 at 1.42.21 PM

Mandy Ford has teamed up with Craig Coopersmith to investigate sepsis, a relatively new field for her, and the collaboration has blossomed in several directions

“This is an issue we’ve been aware of in transplant immunology for a long time,” says Mandy Ford, scientific director of Emory Transplant Center. “Real life humans have more memory T cells than the mice that we usually study.”

Sepsis is like a storm moving through the immune system. Scientists studying sepsis think that it has a hyper-inflammatory phase, when the storm is coming through, and a period of impaired immune function afterwards. The ensuring paralysis leaves patients unable to fight off secondary infections.

In late-stage sepsis patients, dormant viruses that the immune system usually keeps under control, such as Epstein-Barr virus and cytomegalovirus, emerge from hiding. The situation looks a lot like that in kidney transplant patients, who are taking drugs to prevent immune rejection of their new organ, Ford says.

Ford’s team recently found that sepsis preferentially depletes some types of memory T cells in mice. Because T cells usually keep latent viruses in check, this may explain why the viruses are reactivated after sepsis, she says. Read more

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Connections between starvation and immunological memory

Researchers at Emory have been revealing several connections between cells’ responses to starvation and immunological memory. The latest example of this is a paper in Nature Immunology from Rafi Ahmed’s lab, showing that the cellular process of autophagy (literally: self-consumption) is essential for forming and maintaining memory T cells.

This finding has some practical implications for vaccination and could point the way to additives that could boost vaccine effectiveness in elderly humans. Researchers at Oxford have demonstrated that autophagy is diminished in T cells from aged mice, and T cell responses could be boosted in older mice using the autophagy-inducing compound spermidine. Read more

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Unexpected effect on flu immunity

Immunologists reported recently that the drug rapamycin, normally used to restrain the immune system after organ transplant, has the unexpected ability to broaden the activity of a flu vaccine.

The results, published in Nature Immunology, indicate that rapamycin steers immune cells away from producing antibodies that strongly target a particular flu strain, in favor of those that block a wide variety of strains. The results could help in the effort to develop a universal flu vaccine.

This study was inspired by a 2009 Nature study from Koichi Araki and Emory Vaccine Center director Rafi Ahmed, reports Jon Cohen in Science magazine. Read more

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Respiratory infection may lead to weaker immunological memory

How you vaccinate helps determine how you protect. This idea lies behind many researchers’ interest in mucosal vaccines. How a vaccine is administered (orally/nasally vs intramuscular, for example) could make a difference later, when the immune system faces the bad guys the vaccine is supposed to strengthen defenses against.

How does the route of immunization affect the quality of immunity later on? For example, is a nasal spray best when trying to prevent respiratory infections?

A recent paper from Emory Vaccine Center director Rafi Ahmed’s laboratory challenges this idea. The paper was published in the Journal of Immunology. Scott Mueller, now an Australian Research Council research fellow at the University of Melbourne, is first author.

Memory T cells are a key part of a response to a vaccine, because they stick around after an infection, enabling the immune system to fight an invading virus more quickly and strongly the second time around. In the paper, the Emory team compared memory T cells that form in mice after they are infected in the respiratory system by a flu virus or throughout their bodies by a virus that causes meningitis (lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus or LCMV).

The authors engineered a flu virus to carry a tiny bit of LCMV (an epitope, in immunological terms) so that they could compare apples to apples by measuring the same kind of T cells. They found that memory T cells generated after a flu infection are weaker, in that they proliferate and stimulate other immune cells less, than after a LCMV infection. This goes against the idea that after a respiratory infection, the immune system will be better able to face a challenge in the respiratory system.

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